i18n

Hello, everyone. Thanks for the constant stream of useful information.
I've lurked and learned from this list for a while. It's great.

Has anyone seen/built an interface for presenting inline audio
translations of journal or magazine articles? A customer would like
to include translations for small blocks of an article. The blocks
will be of an arbitrary length. Each block would have a corresponding
Spanish and Chinese translation of the original English text. Their
idea is to include an icon at the end of each block that will play an
audio translation of that block.

My line of thought was about best practices on how users select countries and languages on global websites.

A few questions...
Should sites auto detect IP addresses and serve default settings according to country, language?
Should users have ability to chose their preferred country and language preferences off a splash page as in Ikea.com on a first visit (and/or subsequent visits) and have the ability to change at will?

Two projects in a row where I need a list of languages available on
the device, either for setup or settings. Possible options:

Alphabetically, by native language name.
But where do non-phoenician alphabet languages go in that list? Sub
in their English language (so Chinese is written in Chinese, but
placed in the list as if it was "Chinese")?

By likelihood of use. Seems somewhat arbitrary, and the least
apparent to the user.

But they haven't really focused on what I'm after: your favorite examples
for having a person specify what country they live in, in the context of a
web form. Anyone come across a particularly effective way of collecting this
information recently (including consideration for accessibility)? Bonus
points if it does not involve a gigantic dropdown with ~ 195 countries in
it.